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Hi i am new in the data recovering world! I accedentally wrote a bootable XP image file to mt external 1TB HDD by selecting the wrong drive letter, it should have been to my USB flash drive! I can now only see the IMAGE partition when running the TestDisk utility. When doing a deepscan using photorec the utility manages to 'recover' a large amount of data but this is all in the for of multiple file folders which contain only txt files. It does however recover some mp3 file but these are not the bulk of my data. i had a variety of file types safed on my external drive and the amount of data was about 600GB. What am I doing wrong?

When using PhotoRec, select the PhysicalDrive, not a drive letter.
In Options, enable the Expert mode.
Start a recover on "Whole disk"
When asked, use a default blocksize of 512 bytes. Use the default options otherwise.

You need to store the recovered files on another disk than the source.